Free Town Burning by Thomas Williams

now. This is Dr. Karmis. Are you there?”
    “Yes, Doctor, we’ll come now.”
    “We’re doing everything we can, Mrs. Spinelli.”
    She went into the living room and up to Mr. Spinelli, who stood at the window looking out. She put her hands on his small shoulders. “We’ve got to go to the hospital right away,” she said.
    “O.K., Janie,” he said, his eyes averted. She followed him into the hall.
    Mr. Spinelli called upstairs, “Mama! We’ll be back as soon as we can!” No answer from upstairs, but she had heard.
    Mr. Spinelli drove fast, for him, but when they were let into Michael Spinelli’s room they heard the last two or three of long, croupy breaths, and the time between them lengthened and stopped being important. All at once the doctors and nurses straightened up and began to make distinctly different, purposeful movements around the bed. They put away stethoscopes, folded the oxygen tent, gathered long tubes, pulled the sheet up over Michael Spinelli’s head. Jane saw this before Dr. Karmis’ worried face appeared before her. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Spinelli. We did everything we could.” How could he stand to tell anyone this? She looked at him stupidly. Mr. Spinelli led her out into the hall.
    “It’s all right, Doctor,” Mr. Spinelli said, “you done all you could. I’ll take her home. I’ll come right back. Is that O.K., Doctor?”
    He took her to the car and helped her in, then drove through Northlee and took the river road to Leah. When they had gone a mile he pulled over to a wide shoulder where, in winter, the snow-plows turned around. He stopped the car and began to get out, but he forgot to turn off the ignition and the car jerked forward and stalled.
    “My boy,” he said. His forehead hit the horn, which went beep. Jane let him cry but could not help him. Finally she went around to the other side of the car and helped him move over, then drove him home to Leah. By the time they turned into the driveway he had recovered. “I’ll tell her, Janie,” he said.
    They found Mrs. Spinelli in the kitchen, and when she saw their faces she began to scream. Jane walked on through it, and it felt as it had once as a child when her brother put a whistle to her ear and blew as hard as he could—a nearby physical blow against the bones of her head. In her room the closed door did not stop the sound. It rose and fell, sometimes like a siren and sometimes watery, like surf.
    Later the sound diminished. Neighbors and relatives talked in the kitchen in low voices, and only once in a while the siren rose and stopped, or a breaker crashed among the insistent murmurs of sympathy.
    Her window was a hot white square upon the side of the cool room. She went to the window and looked at the street, up and down, bright and clear as childhood in the sun. She had rarely come to this street as a child. The school bus hadn’t passed this street, although the red-brick parochial grammar school, an alien, nun-haunted building, stood on the corner. Mike went to the parochial school, and because of this she hadn’t really known him until high school. She had never been interested in him, except that the continual excitement he caused in school kept him in the news—the girls’ washroom news, the scandalous, whispered news. If someone turned his back on Mike at the wrong time, someone got goosed. It was Mike who started the bent-pin business with the rubber bands, and that ended with another one of his expulsions from school. He shot Miss Colchester, and the pin stuck into her leg. That was when they found out she wore men’s garters with white bandages under them. The teachers always knew when Mike was guilty. How many times had he been expelled? And each time Mr. Spinelli brought him back again and talked to the principal. Nobody disliked Mike. Not the way they disliked Junior, who was nearly as bad, but lacked Mike’s good looks and utter cheerfulness. Mike had never been sneaky—he was always caught. But